How TMZ scales social video across multiple platforms

By Elle Merritt |
Feb 13, 2017

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We’re constantly inspired by the innovative ways that publishers leverage Wibbitz to create content their audiences love, so we decided they deserve a shoutout! This time we’ve chosen to spotlight our star partner TMZ, whose team has been killing the social video game with the help of our multiplatform publishing tools.

TMZ is famous for breaking the biggest celebrity stories of the last 10 years across several different social platforms. They use investigative journalism to produce real-time, video-powered content that has proved to be massively popular over the years. TMZ quickly picked up on the vertical video trend and have been actively using Wibbitz videos to push out breaking-news content in this format.

“With a good portion of our audience on Instagram and Instagram Stories, and increasingly receiving their news on the platform, we can easily & seamlessly extend the reach of our stories to that audience in the vertical video format that works best.”
– Donald Alexander, TMZ Director of Social Media

With over 1.3M followers on Instagram, TMZ’s team is able to reach a large audience with the Wibbitz Snippet, a 10-second video format specifically designed for Instagram & Snapchat stories. Check out this vertical snippet TMZ created in the Wibbitz Control Room for their Instagram Story last week:

In addition to Instagram, TMZ pumped up the amount of video on their Facebook by adding a channel called TMZ Quickies, which largely consists of square-shaped videos their editors created with Wibbitz. Here’s one of the best performing videos on TMZ Quickies, with over 1M views and 16K likes!

TMZ also implements Wibbitz videos into their popular flagship site, where landscape videos tend to work best among their articles’ content. Check out the below example of a Wibbitz video embedded within an article on their page: